If they be confined to "the fifteenth year of Tiberius[419]; to the names of the second Cainan[420], Cyrenius[421], Abiathar[422], 'Jeremy the prophet[423];'" to "the sixth hour[424]," and so on;--no great inconvenience truly will result. But the instant you go a step further, the difficulty begins. Many of the quotations from the Old Testament may be made to correspond with the Hebrew, doubtless, without sensible inconvenience: but there are others which refuse the process. However, let it be supposed that all such indications of imperfect memory, or misapprehension of the sense of the Hebrew Scriptures, have been removed; and here and there, that an irrelevant clause in the reasoning has been lopped off, or an unscientific remark expunged.--After all this has been done, I venture to say that the result will be the reverse of satisfactory, even to the theorist himself. He will infallibly exclaim secretly,--I seem to have gained wondrous little by this corrective process. Was it worth while, in order to achieve _this_, to tamper with the Divine Oracles? The great body of Scripture remains after all, in all its strangeness, all its perplexing individuality. Meanwhile, piety and wisdom modestly suggest,--Is it reasonable to think that Evangelists and Apostles should have stumbled, like children, before dates, and names, and quotations from their own Scriptures? Surely if _this_ be all that can be objected against the Bible, the very slenderness of the charge becomes its sufficient refutation!... _The erasures are so few, in fact, that they refute the theory._